BFG
Technologies today announced their exit from the graphics card
category. The company will continue to sell their line of BFG Tech
power supplies as well as their Deimos gaming notebooks and Phobos
gaming systems.

"After
eight years of providing innovative, high-quality graphics cards to
the market, we regret to say that this category is no longer
profitable for us, although we will continue to evaluate it going
forward", said John Slevin, chairman of BFG Technologies. "We
will continue to provide our award-winning power supplies and gaming
systems, and are working on a few new products as well. I’d like to
stress that we will continue to provide RMA support for our current
graphics card warranty holders, as well as for all of our other
products such as power supplies, PCs and notebooks."

BFG will
continue to offer RMA, telephone and email support for qualified BFG
Tech graphics card warranty holders, but will no longer be bringing
new graphics card products to market.

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It depends on what you are playing, actually. In the games that count--true competitive games like Team Fortress 2, Quake Live etc., (hardcore FPS games), you get more FOV. When you're playing at the pro level, this makes a huge difference.

Actually in Quake Live you control your FOV with a user setting, not your monitor type. You can set it anywhere from 70% to 130%. And some people prefer to play with lower FOV, because they say it increases their accuracy (it magnifies somewhat the entire view)

How it is programmed can make a difference, but not in the way you described.(in fact your example is totally wrong)

There is no reason you should not be scaling 1:1 while playing games, if you don't the image becomes stretched or squished, depending on the ratio of your monitor.

Taking this into account, a game that is only programmed for 16:9 will have the same view ragardless of monitor, be it 4:3, 16:10 or 16:9. Just the size of the black bars will vary, from filling the screen (16:9), to only filling half the screen (4:3).

The only time your FOV is going to be wider is when a game supports multiple ratios and you choose to use the ratio that best fits your screen. i.e A 16:9 monitor playing a 16:9 game has a wider FOV than a 16:10 monitor playing a 16:10 game. That being said, a 16:10 monitor owner can choose at any time to run at 16:9 with black bars on the top, in which your FOV is identical.

Very, very wrong. Games ARE programmed to handle varying aspect ratios in different ways. If your monitor doesn't match the native aspect ratio, there's a lot of different ways they can handle it. They can:

a) Stretch one dimension (horiz or vert) leaving the other untouched.b) Stretch both dimensions, then clip the one that overflows.c) Expand FOV in one dimension, leaving the other untouched.d) Putt black bars on one dimension.

The point is that its totally up to the programmers what the game will do in this situation. There is no standard way to handle it.

You're also wrong about game aspect ratios. A lot of games don't support picking the ratio, they have just one 'native' ratio, and if your monitor doesn't match, they pick one of the methods above and use it.

A 16:9 image is a 16:9 image, the native resolution of the screen does nothing to change that. At most you will be saving real estate, you are not actually viewing any more information. i.e you would have black bars on the top of the screen with a 16:10 screen viewing a 16:9 image.

Now of course some games allow for 16:10 output, in that case a 16:10 monitor viewing a 16:10 image certainly has a lower FOV than a 16:9 monitor with a 16:9 image.

That being said, that does not stop you from running at 16:9 on your 16:10 monitor to get that extra vertical space.

In otherwords, its up to the user. There is nothing stopping anyone from running at 16:9 on a 16:10 monitor (which any gamer that actually finds this important would surely do).

On the other hand, you do get extra horizontal viewing space with 16:10 content, which in my opinion is much better for desktop use. This is why I personally have a 16:10 monitor, and the reasons explained above are why I run at 16:9 when playing games.

I don't want to sound mean, so im just going to say i deal with a lot of cameras, both real and virtual. so with that being said I just wanted to say you are all speaking as if the screen ratio has anything to do with the field of view. think of aspect ratio as your cookie cutter of a larger image. Field of view is basically saying lens distortion, which I think your confusing with lens length. lens length is the stretch that can actually provide more viewable space, but at a lower rez in center most parts of the screen. back to the cookie cutter, take some cookie dough and mash it in there, and bake yourself a special cookie. then after that, place chocolate chunks over the entire surface, those are your pixels. well those are mass produced chunks and theyre all the same size. so if you have a 16:9 and a 16:10 monitor, the 16:10 will have more pixels because its closer to 1:1. lets work with low numbers, lets say your cell phone had 160x90 resolution screen, and your sega nomad (nice example) had a 160x160 rez screen, multiply those on ur handy dandy calculator and realize which one has more pixels. so lets put these two theories together, if you change the image size by shrinking your image in MS Paint and want to see more stuff around this shrunken image *bitmap raster 16 bit uncompressed bmp*, your camera length would have to become shorter and things further away will look even super duper further away. thats why those weird z-translate plus focal shifts look so funny, because the distance of things are changing to your brain but the location of objects arent actually changing in distance from one another. that being said, a shorter camera length is what allows you to see more around you, but you lose details in center frame(same in film but the physical size of film = screen resolution over in the digital world. so with that being said its all based on preference, which will probable reflect the different spacings in our physical eyes. For me personally 16:9 is best for gaming and 16:10 is better for working.*erroneous*